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This Exquisite Forest Brings Collaborative Animation to Chrome

By Tom Cheshire, Wired UK

In the early 20th century, the French surrealists invented a parlor game they called the Exquisite Corpse, which you’ve probably played: Write down a word, fold the paper and hand it to someone else, who writes the next word, until you end up with some Dadaist nonsense. You’ve probably played it with pictures, too.

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Now, Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk, who together created The Johnny Cash Project, have created a version for animation. This Exquisite Forest, a collaboration with the Tate Modern that went live Thursday, lets anyone with access to a browser create a short animation.

The next user can develop that animation (all work submitted to the site falls under a Creative Commons license) or can branch off to take the narrative in a different direction. To provide inspiration, eight artists whose work already hangs in the Tate Modern, including Olafur Elliason and Julian Opie, have created digital, animated saplings for others to grow, along with instructions (Elliason’s instructions: “Be energy (not about energy); Use yellow often, but not always; Show that light is life; Exercise empathetic attention; Share this with friends.”)

These artist trees will be curated, with submissions vetted by Koblin and Co., but “the rest of it’s open: People can submit whatever they want and it will instantly go up,” Koblin says. The best animations will show on large video screens in the Tate Modern over the next six months.

The idea for This Exquisite Forest came from The Johnny Cash Project: “People were making these drawings for that and we could see they wanted to take it further,” Koblin told Wired.co.uk. “So we were thinking, how can we let people steer the course themselves and build something new? So we thought, ‘Let’s let them create the whole trajectory.'”

The site is built in HTML5 and meant to push the Chrome Browser to its limits (Milk and Koblin worked closely with Google engineers; Koblin is creative director of the data arts team at Google). “It required building a whole bunch of infrastructure to support the project,” Koblin says.

Koblin thinks the “collaborative animation platform” shows how technology and art can push each other further, together. “As technology evolves, it manipulates our culture and there’s a huge opportunity to push ourselves further,” he says. “I think it actually makes ourselves maybe more human, or at least human in a different way, that we can connect together in amazingly different ways, and powerful new ways.”